Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race

by Ian Smith

Race may dominate everyday speech, media headlines and public policy, yet still questions of racialized blackness and whiteness in Shakespeare are resisted. In his compelling new book Ian Smith addresses the influence of systemic whiteness on the interpretation of Shakespeare's plays. This far-reaching study shows that significant parts of Shakespeare's texts have been elided, misconstrued or otherwise rendered invisible by readers who have ignored the presence of race in early modern England. Bringing the Black American intellectual tradition into fruitful dialogue with European thought, this urgent interdisciplinary work offers a deep, revealing and incisive analysis of individual plays, including Othello, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet. Demonstrating how racial illiteracy inhibits critical practice, Ian Smith provides a necessary anti-racist alternative that will transform the way you read Shakespeare.

Genres: Shakespeare

226 pages, Hardcover

Published September 29, 2022

About the author

Librarian's Note: There is more than one author with this name on Goodreads.

Reviews

[Mora]

i liked the concept of this book: identifying and discussing where readers/critics/scholars of shakespeare often make assumptions of what happens in the text based on the invisibility of whiteness in day-to-day. however, i didn't think it executed it as well as it could have, and i felt it tended to lose the point.

the book did have several preliminary chapters on theory, which i did read, but since i'm not a scholar of this sort of thing i cannot make valuable commentary on it. i'll go straight into the three play chapters: merchant of venice, hamlet, and othello.

merchant: i think this chapter was the weakest. i was the most confused while reading it, and it didn't seem to be culminating in anything. smith seemed to be bouncing around between what constituted whiteness and what didn't - and if a point was that there are different contextual (or implicit and explicit) definitions, that would be fine, but there didn't seem to be a strong logic to it. this chapter also had a lot of attribution to "what shakespeare intended" (ie to make readers question their own relationship to whiteness) and you cannot really make that claim (or at least without me raising my eyebrow at it).

hamlet: this one did bring up some interesting points, especially around the players. smith highlighted the theater trope of violent/angry black man, how hamlet's speech about pyrrhus associates pyrrhus with blackness, and what implications this can have with how it deviates from greek/latin source texts and also how hamlet is associating himself with pyrrhus here. however, i was not convinced by smith's overall claim in this chapter: that hamlet is about hamlet grappling with his relationship to race/blackness. like, yes, there are racial elements that people tend to gloss over, but i don't think you can go so far as to say hamlet is About race (and smith wasn't convincing enough for me to get on board with his claim). so, mixed opinions on this chapter.

othello: this was the best written chapter, in my opinion. it integrated discussions of the black lives matter movement and especially the concept of telling the stories of black victims of police brutality, and tied that to othello wanting people to tell about him truthfully after his death. one comparison i liked was to hamlet: hamlet tells horatio to tell his story, and othello tells the assembled characters at the end to speak of him accurately. however, there’s that difference between hamlet (white, prince) and othello (black, foreigner) and how horatio and hamlet are roughly equivalent (both white, similarly educated, same age) but there is no one like that for othello. the only people left to tell othello’s story are white people (and not even those who generally have his best interests or know him the best), so how accurately CAN they represent him? smith then tied that to a comment about how can a majority white shakespeare academic field fully discuss race.

[T. Tokunaga]

【Three Stars / An Honorable, Meaningful Failure】

I do think that this book is a failure as a scientific study, for the existence of the Chapter 1 and 5. These are basically very sociopolitical preachments from the viewpoint of a black intellectual (that's a natural thing for him considering his own personal issues and themes), but still failure is a failure. He has relied too much on the basis of Toni Morrison, so the doubt is just augmented even more.

However, this book has a lot of magnificent insights in Shakespeare's treatment of black people and racism in a calm, sober way, which is so hard to find. Who can say such a concise thing regarding Shakespearean tragedy:

Othello is an immigrant, and his ambivalent status as a Venetian outsider mirrors the mounting social tensions arising from the substantial influx of foreigners in late sixteenth-century English society. (P59, Black Shakespeare)

The insight about The Merchant of Venice had a little bit of antisemitism in it, but it's great to know that Jewish "non-fairness" is what's driving Shylock to be "cruel" - for the present age, and a pound of flesh was actually a legal term then - and how this white supremacy is affecting the play itself, meanwhile in Hamlet, Hamlet compares himself to Pyrrhus who is "black" - black Hamlet avenges white violence.

This framework itself is absolutely important and definitely interesting, and this book can be the basis for further studies from various viewpoints, from Asian, Hispanic, African, Austronesian, Continental -European, Slavic, etc.

[Elizabeth Amisu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book, Black Shakespeare, refreshingly says what it is going to do and proceeds to do it, and it intervenes in a wild and impassioned way the debate around the validity of critical race theory in general, asking what its place is in our schools and by its very publication, in the editorial boards of publishing houses. Emerging out of race and ethnicity studies of Shakespeare which have been overwhelmingly ignored in the present day, there is now a fashionable trend toward ethnicity studies in general.

[janelle ‧₊˚✩彡]

read this about a few weeks ago and it ian smith has genuinely changed the way i read shakespeare so insightful!